Dirty Rocker Boys Read Online Free Page B

house, I was met by an unwelcome sight—my mom in her bedroom slippers, smudged makeup around her eyes.
    “Bobbie are you driving ?”
    I put on the parking brake, just like Penny had showed me, unfastened my seat belt, and got out of the car.
    “Yes, I’m an excellent driver.”
    My mom stormed over to the passenger door, opened it, and lifted Adam gently out of the car, holding him close. “There are going to be some changes around here, mark my words,” she said, madder than I’d ever seen her. I got my ass whipped pretty hard that night.
    When I was in my mid-teens, and in the ninth grade, my mom finally left Bobby for good. One night she woke me and my brother and we tiptoed out of the house, into a new life. She had been planning it in secret for a long time. Our new home was farther away from my friends, and smaller, a three-bedroom townhome. But I didn’t care—I was tired of the nights of driving around the bars looking for my dad. I was tired of lying as flat as I could on the floorboard of the car, trying to make myself disappear. I was tired of my mom having to find him, sometimes with another woman, always drunk.
    Bobby had started picking on my little brother, which really riled me. I started purposely provoking my dad, hitting him hard on the back of the head with a comb while he was watchingTV, calling him names. I would stand, silent, watching him pick a belt out of the closet, or a switch out of the tree. “I’m going to spank you till you cry,” he would tell me. But I never let myself shed a tear. They would well in my eyes, but I never let them fall. When my mom told me she was filing for divorce, I felt relieved. And this time when Bobby tried to win her back, it didn’t work.
THE MARVELOUS MR. EARL
    Mr. Earl LeSage was everything my father wasn’t—soft-spoken, softhearted, and practically a teetotaler. He never raised his voice, and he agreed with absolutely everything my mother said. He had a successful flooring and carpeting business, and had met my mom when he did our floors. She was still married to my dad at the time, and Mr. Earl was married too, but it was clear from day one that he would do anything to help her. Sometimes that meant trying to find my dad a job, just so that he could pay our bills. Mr. Earl was always putting in a good word for Bobby, not because he liked him, but because he hated to see my mom suffer. When Judy finally left Bobby, Mr. Earl was also freshly divorced, and waiting with open arms.
    Mr. Earl had grown up poor, but had worked very hard to make his business a success. He was kind and caring, and my mom, after years of fighting and struggling with Bobby, finally started to understand what a truly loving relationship could feel like. She fell madly in love, and even quit wearing high heels,so she wouldn’t tower over him (he was shorter than her). They made a handsome couple. Mr. Earl always knew how to dress—he wore snakeskin cowboy boots and belts that matched, with slacks and a nice ironed shirt, and he had a quite collection of cowboy hats. He was a gentle man who loved nature, and his favorite thing in the world, perhaps, apart from my mom, was his garden. Corn, beans, potatoes, turnips—you name it, he grew it. He always grew the plumpest, reddest tomatoes in town, the size of small pumpkins and ten times as sweet.
    After my mom married Mr. Earl, she, my brother, and I moved in with him into this big old house on four acres of land just outside Baton Rouge. It was pretty there, although the summers were almost intolerably hot. And there was no escaping the lovebugs. Lovebugs (they’re also known as “honeymoon flies,” and “kissing bugs,”) look like flies that are connected by the tail in pairs, stuck to each other for days after they mate. They would drift in huge, slow clouds in the late summer and if your car ran into one of the swarms, you’d have to clean them off right away; otherwise the acid in their blood could strip your